VOXEL POPULI
Game Hytale
Developer/publisher Hypixel Studios
Format PC
Release 2021
What happens when the announcement trailer for your indie game gets 54 million views – and counting? Well, first, your website has a minor meltdown. “There was a moment when the countdown hit zero, and the website script didn’t just quite perfectly fire,” project lead Aaron ‘Noxy’ Donaghey recalls. Everyone on the Hytale team, spread all across the world and gathered on Teamspeak for the occasion, held their breath for a good few seconds. Then the network team sprang into action to fix the issue. “And there was an inhalation – we watched the trailer once, and nothing was happening for like, the first two minutes.” But, as people started to finish the video, comment after comment after comment appeared underneath it. The reaction videos started rolling in ten minutes later. “It was…” Donaghey exhales. “Euphoric is an understatement.”
His fear was that Hytale – a game with more than a passing resemblance to Minecraft, created by many people with a background in running a successful Minecraft server – would be dismissed as yet another title destined for the ever-growing blockgame graveyard. But the trailer – which showed off features such as a realistically lit and animated world, adventure and minigame modes, extensive modding, an in-game animation tool and even live scripting – immediately struck a chord. “We had an internal poll on how many views,” Donaghey says. “In my head, you know, anything below 250,000, I’m disappointed. 500,000, I’m happy, and a million, I’m like, super happy.” At the end of the first week, the trailer hit 11 million views. The eyes of thousands of players, and some of the biggest players in the game industry, are now very much upon the project he’s leading. “I don’t want to come across like, ‘Oh, we’re burdened with all this interest’,” he laughs. “But it does change things. It undeniably changes things.”
Before Hytale, there was Hypixel. Started by Simon Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchette, it was one of the many fan-made Minecraft servers that popped up in 2013. Players were getting very good at using Minecraft’s creation tools – most often redstone, the game’s simplified version of electronics – to build complicated contraptions and incorporate them into ‘adventure maps’, focused campaigns that others could download and play, provided they had the technical know-how to get it running. Many did not: the process of hunting for hidden folders, ensuring the server config was working, and that your chosen mod was compatible with the version of the game you were using as well as the client you were using it with, was a headache. And so Collins-Laflamme and Touchette decided to run a server that would function as a playable library of all their adventure maps, where players could simply join the server to access a suite of games.
THE EYES OF THOUSANDS OF PLAYERS, AND SOME OF THE BIGGEST PLAYERS IN THE GAME INDUSTRY, ARE NOW VERY MUCH UPON THE PROJECT
It quickly became popular. There were sometimes hundreds of people queuing in the lobby waiting for their adventure to begin. It was chaos. The solution? Introduce short, entertaining minigames to keep people occupied: snowball fights, or homages, or even a curious thing called ‘Hunger Games’, inspired by a new film series, where you’d battle to be the last player standing in an ever-shrinking arena. Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, these short, fast, rewarding and player since beta, a kind of server-slash-social experiment called “opened my eyes to the possibilities of things that could be done in ”. He ended up getting a job at game server host Multiplay helping with customer support as, in his words, “the guy at the company”.
